HWS News
4 August 2023 • Faculty Hot Summer for Woodworth’s Plays
Five plays by Professor of Theatre Chris Woodworth have earned recognition this summer.
Since the end of the spring semester, Professor of Theatre Chris Woodworth has been on a hot streak with her playwriting. Five of her plays have been recognized with awards, grants, publications and productions.
The New York State Council on the Arts awarded Woodworth an individual artist grant to develop her new full-length play, an adaptation of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy Medea. Her play, Medea Kills Her Children, will have a free public staged reading on Saturday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. in McDonald Theatre. The reading will be directed by guest artist Sara Chambers (Bowling Green State University) and feature local actors from Rochester and Geneva, as well as HWS students.
In May, Woodworth’s 10-minute play Something Blue was a winner of the Stage It! Ten-Minute Play Festival at the Arts Center in Bonita Springs, Fla. The play was published in the festival’s collection and was selected from a pool of 467 international submissions as one of 10 plays to be fully produced.
Also in May, Woodworth gave a talk at the Ulysses Historical Society in Trumansburg, N.Y. about the process of researching and writing her full-length play Fossenvue. The talk was followed by a staged reading of an excerpt from the play.
Another of her full-length plays, Petrichor, was a semi-finalist for both the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and the Ashland New Play Festival, while her 10-minute play All That Remains was a semi-finalist for the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective New Venture Short Play Festival, which explored the theme “The Evolution of Human Rights.”
Woodworth, who serves as chair of the Theatre Department, joined the HWS faculty in 2013 and has directed numerous productions on campus including “Love/Sick,” “5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche” and “She Kills Monsters.” At HWS, she teaches such classes as “Theatre History” and “Playwriting Workshop.” This fall she is teaching “American Experimental Theatres” and “Acting I,” supervising three Independent Studies in Advanced Playwriting, and advising an Honors Project in Playwriting.
Continuing her commitment to new work, in the winter Woodworth will direct the developmental production of Brandon Monokian’s new play Zombie Cheerleaders, a Teenage Witch, & the Demonic Voice on the Other End of the Phone. Her most recent scholarly work is a local micro history project, exploring the 128-year-old Smith Opera House in Geneva, N.Y. through scholarly articles, history tours, blog posts, community-based site-specific performances, and a YouTube series. Woodworth is coeditor of Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from Bowling Green State University, a master’s in Theatre and Drama from Indiana University and a B.A. in Speech and Theatre, English Literature from St. Lawrence University.
The photo above was taken in March when Woodworth was in Buffalo for opening night of Buffalo Quickies at the Alleyway Theatre, where her play The Last Bee was part of the lineup.
